Think of the most liberal city in America—San Francisco, say, or Cambridge, Mass. In 2008, both of those cities voted for Barack Obama over John McCain by margins of 86% to 14%.

Those margins probably don’t surprise you, but here’s something that might: The residents of those cities are actually more conservative, on aggregate, than the Washington presscorps — the people who report the political news.

In fact, according to UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose, San Francisco and Cambridge are roughly twice as conservative as Washington correspondents.

Conservatives have long complained that the media are too liberal. They refer derisively to “Big Media,” “the drive-by media,” and the “lamestreammedia” whenever they want to signal their skepticism about something they hear in the mainstream press.

Liberals usually respond in one of two ways.They argue that the media only seem liberal because conservatives and their favorite media outlets are so far to the right. Alternatively, they insist that although most reporters hold liberal views and vote for Democrats consistently, they are still professionals who would never even dream of injecting their personal views into their craft.

Multiple studies refute these claims — and so does any objective reading of the newspapers and viewing of newscasts.

Journalists have voted disproportionately for Democratic presidential candidates in every election for at least two generations, and the imbalance is actually getting worse. In the lead-up to the 2004 election, New York Times columnist John Tierney conducted an unscientific poll of 153 journalists.When asked who would make a better president, the journalists from outside the beltway chose Democrat John Kerry 3 to 1.But those based in Washington, DC, preferred Kerry 12 to 1.

Journalists are also much more likely to embrace the liberal label than are average Americans. Among the American population at large, 41% self-identify as conservative and 23% as liberal. According to a 2008 survey of more than 200 journalists by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, self-described liberals outnumbered conservatives 4 to 1.

In his 2011 book “Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind,” Groseclose setout to calculate media bias mathematically. Using sophisticated statistical analysis, Groseclose concluded that “every mainstream national news outlet in the United States has a liberal bias.”

Groseclose found that 18 of 20 news sources he studied were left of center. The only two to the right were the Washington Times and the“Fox News Special Report with Brit Hume.”

Groseclose’s conclusions generated an avalanche of negative media attention from liberal news outlets, as well as a lot of personal hate mail. But they were rooted in statistical analysis that had been designed to measure the ideological positions of members of Congress and based on a paper he co-authored that appeared in the peer-reviewed Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Groseclose calculated that The New York Times’ ideological slant is roughly on par with that of liberal Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman.

In an e-mail interview,Groseclose asserted,“Without media bias, America would vote about like Texas or Kentucky.” That’s a pretty bold claim, but it certainly isn’t crazy to think that the media have some effect on how people vote — an effect helpful to Democrats.

The public was very aware of the media’s liberal bias in the 2012 election. According to an August 2012 Rasmussen Reports public opinion poll, 59%of likely voters believed Obama had received the most favorable treatment from the media during the campaign. Just 18% thought that of Romney. Rasmussen also found that 51% of likely voters expected the media to help Obama, while only 9%expected the media to help Romney.

This followed 2008, when 70% of respondents in a Pew poll felt the media wanted Obama to win. Only 9% believed they wanted McCain to win.

And Obama’s re-election didn’t stop the favorable news stories about him; it multiplied them.And if the early days of his second term are any indication, we can look forward to another four years of fawning reports.

Obama’s post-election press conference on Nov. 14, 2012,washis first full press conference in eight months. Ahead of it, Politico published an interesting piece, predicting the types of tough questions Obama would be asked. Among their suggested queries:

■ “Do you believe the FBI should have told you and Congress sooner about the investigation that led General Petraeus to resign?”

■ “On the fiscal cliff, is your bottom line rates or revenue? Is it enough to close tax loopholes and deductions on the wealthy, or must tax rates also go up in order for you to sign a deal?”

■ “Why was the US Consulate in Benghazi so lightly guarded, despite complaints about deteriorating security conditions in Libya?”

And do you suppose journalists asked these? A few tough questions were asked,but there was also a lot of fluff. Here were some of the questions the Washington correspondents asked the president of the United States after he had been under wraps for eight months:

■ “What lessons, if any, did Democrats learn from this last election and the Latino vote?”

■ “Mr.President,on election night you said that you were looking forward to speaking with Governor Romney, sitting down in the coming weeks to discuss ways that you could work together on this nation’s problems. Have you extended that invitation? Has he accepted? And in what ways do you think you can work together?”

One reporter even offered her congratulations to the newly re-elected president.

With such a cooperative media, it’s a wonder why Obama doesn’t hold more press conferences. It’s always important for a politician to keep in touch with his base.

David Freddoso is the editorial editor of the Washington Examiner. Excepted with permission from his new book, “Spin Masters: How the Media Ignored the Real News and Helped Reelect Barack Obama” (Regnery Publishing), out this week.